John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra might be one of the most precisely engineered, solidly constructed, and elegantly executed operas of the past 25 years. For a tragic love story, it’s also mysteriously unmoving. After a world premiere three years ago at the San Francisco Opera and a second run at Barcelona’s Liceu, this big, populous, swords-and-sandals blockbuster arrived at the Metropolitan Opera trailing ghostly memories of Elizabeth Taylor (onscreen) and Leontyne Price (onstage). Samuel Barber’s even more opulent music drama by the same name opened the Met’s new house in 1966, with Price as the queen of queens, and is now remembered chiefly as a spectacular dud. Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra had some exorcising to do.
It certainly gets that job done. The score is propulsive and taut, the singing strong, and Elkanah Pulitzer’s production flips back and forth between Alexandria and Rome with action-movie ease. The choreographer Annie-B Parson weaves her dancers through the action, adding energy and grace without ever slowing the plot. Whenever the chorus gets unleashed, it roars and springs.
Adams has spent much of his career as a composer honing his command of grandeur. He long ago learned how to drop frail humans into seismic situations and see how they react. In a moment of onstage solitude — one character, one conscience, and an audience of thousands — people who are condemned to historical importance can probe the gulf between their own, often petty emotions and the majesty of their fate. In Doctor Atomic, J. Robert Oppenheimer faces his golem of mass destruction. In Nixon in China, the aggrieved president is heartfelt about healing a global schism. In The Death of Klinghoffer, the title character mildly accepts the mantle of sacrifice against a backdrop of endless violence.
Here we have a pair of potentates who behave like the movie stars who played them — history and Hollywood get rolled together in the common imagination of their love. They are magnificently petulant, ferociously randy, and so enmeshed in their own gratification that they let the world that revolves around them spin toward bloodshed. In theory, at least, there’s romance at the center of all this epicness, and it’s up to the composer to supply the food of love. But Adams seems uninterested in the mushy stuff. His characters come off as feisty egoists who enjoy sparring and comparing the size of their ambitions. They don’t visibly care for each other; even their sexual compulsions seem efforted and deliberate.
Adams plucked out Shakespeare’s lines and mounted them like gems in a finely wrought score. The orchestration — rich, fluid, and glistening with the vaguely exotic plinks of the cimbalom — has the plushness of an antique carpet. And just as you might hesitate to walk on such an artwork, I sometimes wished the singers would stop getting in the way of all that lovely orchestral music, performed by an elite ensemble under the composer’s baton.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
That’s partly because Adams has developed such a distinctive vocal style, a mixture of unfussy American diction and proclamatory aloofness, that the singers all sound more like his creations than they do their separate characters. He wrote the role of Cleopatra for the soprano Julia Bullock, practically laminating the lines to her supple legato and velvety low register. She’s the ideal Adams singer, yet the bond between her voice and the composer’s spirit produces a character who’s only medium-wild and semi-queenly — at least until her final unsung and unprettified scream. Gerard Finley’s Antony makes a good partner to this rather domesticated Cleopatra. Finley sang the role of Oppenheimer in Doctor Atomic, and there he was perfect as the refined but tormented intellectual, the scientist who recites John Donne while cities burn. He brings the same warmth and poise to Antony, but the character it produces is more a weak-willed patsy than an ensorcelled warrior with a calamitously self-destructive streak.
Here, what animates the score is not lust that blots out reason or the redemptive power of love. Instead, Adams places his characters like figures in a frieze, posing against a sweeping panoply of history. Their conflicts are the world’s, their mistakes the cause of mass suffering. Antony and Cleopatra’s benighted love story plays out against the surge of Roman power, and Caesar, sung with biting clarity by Paul Appleby, comes off as a modern Duce. Adams is at his best in the Roman scenes, scoring the relentless cinematic churn of power, the undercurrent of menace, the constant buzz of violence.
As is so often true in operatic productions of recent decades, the default relevance setting is the era of European fascism of nearly a century ago. And so we get the familiar black-shirted, goose-stepping dance corps and chorus, made more period-specific by the historical footage that Bill Morrison weaves into projections. In an interview in the program, Pulitzer gives this ancient story a distinctively contemporary gloss: Antony and Cleopatra are emblems of diversity; “Caesar is a nationalist fascist leader and is seeking to eradicate other cultures.” To her, she explains, “this piece is about the transformative power of love to create a world that embraces difference.” That interpretation flips Adams’s opera on its head, since military disaster nearly extinguishes their passion and his-and-hers suicides clear the way for Roman conquest. If anything, it’s about the logic of empire quashing a marriage of true minds.
Antony and Cleopatra is at the Metropolitan Opera through June 7.
